Making a buck in the TV business isn’t as easy as it used to be. As a result, the glitzy showcases that networks put on for their advertisers aren’t as much fun as they once were, either.
TV’s annual “upfront” has been a staple of the Madison Avenue calendar for decades. Since the 1960s, executives from at least one TV network have put on, as Ed Sullivan once said, “a really big show” for the top spenders from General Motors, Coca-Cola and Apple in hopes of securing millions of dollars ahead of the next programming season. Attendees regularly visited New York City, dined on chilled shellfish, drank free booze, collected TV-star autographs and met up with TV ad-sales executives and media buyers from their current agency of record.
Now this spectacle is decidedly less spectacular.
Upfront Week once played out over four days, but has recently been scaled down to three. Gone is a long-running end-of-the-week soiree backed by Fox that once drew all the top media agency executives (Fox’s current after-showcase celebration is less ambitious and no longer is open to the press that has attended its upfronts for years. Perhaps the Murdochs have grown weary of feeding the media that bites them?). Missing, also, is the last-day presentation from CW, when it was backed by CBS and the company once known as Time Warner. The network’s current owner, the TV-station giant Nexstar, seems less likely to spend big on luring ad dollars when it’s still working to wring profits from the operation.
With fewer days to lure ad dollars, all the current industry players are running up against one another. Amazon, which last year took over a Tuesday-morning slot previously held by Disney’s ESPN, this year plans to talk to would-be Prime Video advertisers on Monday evening — a slot that has in recent years been used by Fox and NBCUniversal. Suddenly, those two companies are losing their grip on hours once used to hold dinners and meetings with clients in town.
As a result, NBC has moved an event built around Telemundo typically held on Monday evenings to Tuesday, where it is likely to bump up against an after-party usually put on by Disney. Disney, meanwhile, is holding a press event Tuesday morning to talk about ESPN that executives at Spanish-language giant TelevisaUnivision fear will siphon away journalists who might typically attend an upfront showcase it has planned in a similar time slot. In 2024, Amazon did just that by holding an event in lower Manhattan that started later than expected, making the trek for a Univision spotlight in midtown more onerous.
The joy is palpable?
It’s easy to blame the current state of affairs on the coronavirus pandemic. With big events then seen as “super-spreaders,” the networks turned to virtual, streaming presentations and advertisers and agencies learned they didn’t need to meet in person to get business done. And with more ad dollars moving to streaming and digital — arenas in which the TV networks are less dominant — the networks seem weaker, particularly as Amazon and Netflix join them as part of the upfront calendar.
One significant player has gotten off the ride. CBS once served a sort of upfront bellwether, holding forth each year from Carnegie Hall, once recruiting The Who to spotlight its primetime schedule. These days, the network’s parent company, Paramount Global, is desperately hoping to sell itself to a new owner. CBS hasn’t had a Carnegie Hall upfront since 2022.
The company’s current ad-sales chief has no regrets. Traditional upfront presentations have become “a thing which we just roundly hear is not a great user experience,” says John Halley, Paramount’s president of advertising. The events are “bombastic,” he says, and don’t allow for an exchange of ideas between media outlet and advertiser. Instead, Paramount holds nine different dinners for specific agencies and advertisers, replete with guests that might include Drew Barrymore, Jon Stewart, Tony Romo and Jeremy Renner.
“Being able to hear from our customers, what they need from us, is critical,” Halley says. “It’s critical, and it can’t be replicated in the big show.”
The upfront market remains important for advertisers who want to secure a presence in programing with a limited, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shelf life. That’s stuff like sports, a “SNL” anniversary special, news programming, an awards show, maybe a limited series that only posts episodes once a week. Most everything else can be consumed or binged at a viewer’s leisure.
The modern reality is that advertisers are frequently in the market all year long, not just in May. They know that if they need inventory, they can probably snatch something up via programmatic technology that allows them to buy impressions defined by specific audience characteristics or use new-era systems that beam a commercial for dog food to one household and a spot for cat food to another.
With such dynamics in play, the upfronts carry less importance than they once did, though holding them seems to still be of use. The showcases bring the industry and its sponsors together for a week and generate reams of promotion. Still, it’s clear that their utility is in decline, while their costs remain significant.
No one will stop doing upfront outreach until advertisers like Procter & Gamble and McDonald’s say they’re done buying ads in such fashion. Until that happens, the parties will continue. But some of the “Mad Men” who put on the shows may find themselves getting angrier.
